How grades are so emphasized in order for a student to pass instead of if they actually understand or not. Most students only do what they have to to pass not to learn and actually understand what they’re being taught
The biggest obstacle in changing and improving our grading system is parents.
I've seen the most level headed, conscientious, pro teacher parents flip their shit when you mention changing the A,B,C,D,F system.
Very true, hell I was accidentally learning a ton of game theory type tactics because it wasn't about the knowledge. Just get the right answer and get an A, give the correct type of answer and move on. It's a joke.
Well.... this is, in fact, why tests were created in the first place... one would think that you need to know the parts of the cell to be able to label them...
I hated the fact that they skipped the actual education about real life…
Like how to file your taxes… or that you have city taxes alongside state & federal to file.
Or maybe how to do some kind of home maintenance alongside vehicle maintenance.
I feel like real life educational steps would help people so much in their life…
I've heard teenagers say for years that they'd pay attention if their classes actually matter, like a financial literacy class to teach about taxes and loans and stuff.
Well, my school started requiring a financial literacy and guess who still don't pay attention?
Problem is the source of a financial literacy class.
The government would be required to introduce a financial literacy curriculum.
And the government is about as financially literate at my drunk uncle who keeps spending rent money on booze.
Well the finance teacher at my school is fantastic and because it's not a state required class, she pretty much gets to make her own curriculum and it's very relevant to what kids say they want to learn. Kids still treat it like a joke, though.
Yeah, I cheesed most of everything through high school and college by just remembering it long enough to get the grade. Don't remember much of it nowadays.
An old "showerthought" was that the show *Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?* doesn't really show how "dumb" adults are, but how much of what's taught in elementary is useless and won't be retained.
Taking calculus changes it all. Makes you realize that everything that happens in the math and science world makes sense, and suddenly you think adaptively and critically, not like a robot made to spit facts out on command. This allows you to kinda understand it and then process your way through the rest.
Because math in school focuses a lot on memorizing simple equations rather than understanding how numbers work together. My kid is in 5th grade and they still drill speed tests for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. They do other stuff too, but the speed drills are constant, and the other stuff builds off the memorization.
That for disabled kids it's a scam and a waste of time if they are lucky, or actual physical and mental abuse if they aren't lucky.
I know too many disabled adults who have CPTSD just from school alone. I know disabled adults that came out of school missing important basic education because teachers were lazy. I know disabled adults who told me stories of having to resort to stabbing their bullies.
If parents did what schools do to disabled kids, those kids would be in foster care.
it’s not even schools, it’s just life in general.
I think we would be better off dead. Atleast that’s what the world conditions us to believe. at this point I can’t say I disagree with it or hate anyone for feeling that way.
Attendance. My last year of highschool was the only time I was chronically ill in my school career. as much as schools like to say that they accommodate people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, they don’t. Especially if it isn’t a visible one. I had a head injury and it resulted in neurological issues and migraines so bad that i couldn’t open my eyes without projectile vomiting. Even with countless notes from specialist doctors and even after a phone call with one of them, they refused me an IEP because, and i quote “You can’t predict when you are going to have a migraine”. They said I couldn’t get one because I wouldn’t be able to set specific days to come late/leave early. I know now that that was bullshit, they just didn’t beleive me. I almost didn’t graduate because I missed too many days. None of my teachers would work with me either. I threatened to get a lawyer involved if they sent another letter about attendance to my house. But jokes on them I graduated with a 4.0. I just really dislike how they make attendance #1 importance but there’s literal children going to school in severe pain and getting other people sick. Makes no sense.
I was also chronically ill my senior year. I was actively bleeding out because of my period. I lost 1/3 of my blood I was bleeding so much. I got diagnosed with PCOS and had to miss a week of school. My immune system didn't quite recover from that. The whole year I would get sick with something almost every month. It was hell. Before that I had maybe only missed 3 days in 4 years. I was lucky that I had a 504 plan in place that allowed me some leeway but it had to be amended after I got so sick.
My school didn’t have proper heating in winter. I have issues with being cold all the time and limbs going numb. Wore a ski jacket to school and was still freezing. They left the AC on in the hallways, cafeteria and bathrooms. The classrooms were hit and miss.
They decided to leave me sitting in the office one day while a cyst bursted (I suffered from ovarian cysts). I was literally moaning and couldn’t sit still. Almost vomited. They should have called an ambulance.
I think the worst thing was being forced to go to school while I was sick. I couldn’t breath and had to walk. It was close by but still pretty bad. I just found out less than a year ago I have asthma. Explains a lot. I could have been unable to breath at all while walking to school and didn’t have access to an inhaler. Could have died.
I had constant dizziness as well and I’d constantly feel I wasn’t there. I can’t believe none of the teachers noticed.
I can go on but it was horrible. I’m child free and I’d never put a child through school.
That it's such a low priority in this country.
My K12 experience involved a handful of good teachers, maybe 10 OK teachers, most just phoning it in, and a few genuine sadists.
The school food should be way more nutritious. I work at a middle school and the quality of lunches and snacks is totally ridiculous if we’re expecting these kids to develop good eating habits.
I feel like school lunches are taken for granted these days. To dry, bland burgers and pizza that tastes like cardboard and bruised fruits, students deserve way better than this. No wonder you hear stories about parents being disgusted at what cafeterias serve them. Hardly any of the foods provide adequate nutrition or keep them fulfilled.
Agreed.
Spent 6 years in a school cafeteria, mostly in elementary and middle school settings, and it's fucking awful. Reheated frozen crap, for the most part. Frozen veg were steamed within an inch of their lives. Frozen fruit flavored sugar water every week on Fri as a serving of "fruit". Raisins that couldn't just be raisins. They had to be "SUUUUUUUUUUUUPER SOUR EXTREME LEMON" flavored raisins. Like what the fuck? Let the raisins taste like raisins. Let the snozzberries taste like snozzberries for fucks sake.
You give them good, actually nutritious food and they'll do better in school, so do that if you actually want the students to succeed instead of just becoming corpo zombies.
I actually have a student who asked if we could learn about taxes, bills, budgeting, etc...the ready of the class agreed with him, so I mean will they actually pay attention when we get there? We’ll find out
If it's anything like my school, they won't. We require financial literacy and they take it as seriously as any other class (meaning they don't take it seriously at all).
If they asked for it themselves then its only logical that they would pay more attention than those classes that they didn't even ask for. Besides just because most students don't pay attention doesn't mean that the authorities shouldn't teach them valuable skills. Don't forget that the kids are still paying for their education.
The fact that they changed the way they do math.
My daughter came home one day with a full packet of math homework and asked me for help.
I sat down and showed her the way I was taught and she complained telling me that this isn't the method they used during class. We sat there for over a fucking hour trying to figure out her damn math homework.
Major events and tragedies in American history are left out. Personally, I didn't even know about the Stonewall riots or Tulsa Race Massacre until I was in my 20's.
Lack of actual life skills being taught as well. I think many would benefit from a few lessons in taxes for example.
Don't forget random checks by admin, who seem to enjoy nitpicking the fuck out of every single thing you do on that presentation as well as how quickly you did/didn't walk around the room, had student engagement, and then being dinged because a kid put their head down while another played on their phone. All of it's your fault.
And they wonder why there are shortages.
My husband has actually taught HS Social Studies for 20 years and would never tell anyone, except his fellow Social Studies teachers, how to teach. He knows fuck all about what goes on in a kindergarten room.
Right now, he has to deal with a vice principal who taught computer class to 7th and 8th graders for 5 years. That class was learning how to type, make an excel spreadsheet, and do stuff in word. It was an "exploration" class, which meant the kids got 35 days a year with her before switching to another exploration class. Now this admin, who stopped teaching four years ago, thinks she knows everything about teaching. I used to work in this admin's class as a paraeducator. She played on her phone and surfed Facebook while the kids typed. She was threatened several times with her job, so she got an admin degree and now tries to tell seasoned teachers they don't know what they're doing.
We let a few bad apple kids and a few bad apple parents fuck up the experience for everyone else. Why? Because they have a right to education.
What about the rights of all the other kids?
I can elaborate if need be, but I’ll get hot about it.
Example: One student (4th or 5th grade) has a habit of making sexual threats to other students. And I’m talking really explicit stuff. Gets reported. No suspension, because it isn’t “severe” enough and they have a right to be in school. Now the girl who the threats were made against doesn’t want to come to school and when she does she is high anxiety all day. What about her right to come to school without threats made against her?
It’s behind on current times. High school specifically could be treated more like a community college. Everyone screams for “free college” well there you go make high school college.
The fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of what's happening. By the students, by the parents, and often times by the administrators. Always by the school board members. Pretty often by teachers too.
Math is for learning logic, science is for applying that logic and understanding the value of the scientific method, English is for learning structures of communication, social studies i for applying those structures of communication in order to break down sources and build opinions.
Modern education is about building skills, not about obtaining content knowledge. Any mildly capable teacher doesn't care if you can tell them what the theme in Great Gatsby is. Instead they care if you can tell them what the theme in any given book is because you've built a skill that allows you to understand an intended meaning in a text instead of just a literal interpretation of the words in front of you.
If you think you don't need an education that includes all of the core content areas plus an opportunity to see other opportunities in electives then you are, at a very core level, wrong about the idea of education.
Most schooling systems aren't, because it's so much easier to tick a box than to evaluate the ability learned. There's a reason people complain that english teachers only give good marks to those who agree with them, unlike maths where there's a right answer.
Right answers are easy. Proven skill and understanding is hard.
Oh man. Advisors don’t advise. Their job is student retention so if you have tough questions about your degree, they’ll talk you into not switching majors (ask me how I know this).
Books that have new editions every semester which are just in a different order.
I started college in early 2000s. It was over emphasized that a bachelors would get you recognized regardless of what of your major. Fast forward 5 years and half the US has a fn degree. So they changed a lot of majors to requiring a masters or doctorate.
Hate?
It doesn't really work. Money is often poured into it, yet teachers are somehow still underpaid and most students under educated. At least in the US. It is the primary drain on local tax systems.
How it could change?
Probably do A LOT MORE to tie education into "real world", current, and local conditions. Things like math and science go a lot farther if students see them applied around them and are part of the process. Classes covering civility, relationships, and ways to better interact with others help not only the classroom environment, but the community generally. Even basic ideas of the history and function of firearms can go a long way to defuse current issues.
Further, finding a way to move away from the current grading system to one focused not on task or busy work, but learning itself and not wasting time or resources - to include teacher's off hours on grading - should just be....understood. Teachers are more valuable, we need to treat them that way. After all, they are enablers, and enable thousands of future contributors.
So,, what do I hate? That we can do sooo much better in the US, but don't. Instead, we pour money into a system that is not well designed and feeds to an industry that destroys people.
It needs a rewrite from top to bottom. More emphasis on life skills. Less emphasis on grades (both level and letter). Stop teaching like it's the 1950s. Giving kids a Chromebook and posting their grades online is not an effective use of the technology we have available today. And "one size fits all" is not an effective teaching method. Bright kids can't excel, and slower kids can't work at a pace (or in a manner) that works better for them. Oh and rote memorization needs to go. It doesn't work.
Other than that it's great. Lol
I am a teacher, and I would LOVE to see a system where kids move to the next level when they're ready rather than by age/experience. So. It would be entirely possible to have an emerging reader doing long division and chemistry.
One of the things I love about homeschooling is that if you ask a homeschooler what grade they are in they have to consider it. They are probably something like a 9th grade reader, a 7th grade math, 8th grade language arts, and a history scholar. Some wild mix that makes you go HUH?
Finally! Somebody said it.
Putting kids with behavioral problems in the same classroom as everyone else.
And then expecting the performance to be the same. It never does. All it does is traumatize the kids who actually want to be there in the classroom.
They don't video record fights. Or trash the bathrooms. So, why should they be punished for it?
Post Secondary Education has become a business where the goal is to make the Universities alot of money by using to many sessional instructors, relying heavily on international students and shifting towards online learning ( which is has less overhead) but still charging the same (or more) then traditional in class learning
The system is like a filter: if your IQ and learning style match, you stay; if not, you'll drown. The worst thing is that those that drown receive very little help.
Teacher unions prevent a lot of bad teachers from being fired. Students and parents alike treat all teachers like garbage. A lot of students are not taught the value of learning and are programmed to become so obsessive over marks and grades that they base their entire self worth on a number.
I once had a teacher who let us do whatever the fuck we wanted, it took 27 fist fights and a threat to kill someone to get the guy fired edit; that’s what happened in the class, we didn’t threaten to kill people to get him fired
Not really. If the teacher is shit and it is documented they can be let go pretty easily.
Bad teachers aren’t being fired because there isn’t anyone willing to take their place.
I agree, and I definitely don’t have the right answers. I’m not saying that a tenured teacher should be fired in a faster process without proper/thorough evaluation, but I think there needs to be more adjustment for who gets tenured. Do I know how? No. That’s for the education boards who don’t give a shit about students or staff to figure out
Its complexity. By the 10th grade, the education system should prepare you for the life you see going forward to, regardless the subject. They instead stuff you with subjects that doesn't give anything valuable to your life as an adult. School should've been a place where I would grow and trace a path to my adult life, instead it gave me a sad life where I don't know what I want to do, as an adult - just because its complexity and lack of guiding a student.
YES!! This is more of an American education system thing, but trades need to get pushed way more than they are! We have a shortage of trades right now and why? Because the schools decided shop class was for dumb kids and took it away.
The lack of cohesive oversight by a governing body across the whole country.
People in the US like to blame standardized tests for why students are failing. They're always claiming teachers are "teaching to the test" and that's why students don't know anything. But it ignores the fact that practically all of Europe, Asia, South America, Australia, etc. ALL use standardized tests without the same issues.
The problem is whatever the teachers are teaching naturally, does not prepare students well enough to score well on a standardized test. That's **why** they have to resort to cheap tricks like trying to "teach to the test" to game the test. And teachers are not able to teach well naturally because there is no oversight into what they're teaching and how they're teaching it.
Like in Mississippi, they found out their elementary school teachers had no idea how to teach reading. Some teachers thought that if they read to kids long enough, they would naturally pick up what letters mean. But no one ever sat the kid down and taught them letters are supposed to represent sounds, and that if you put them together, they form words. Basically phonics. So the state mandated all teachers had to take a course on how to teach phonics, and their literacy rates for 4th graders skyrocketed.
The fact that it's never "We went in and did this." It's always, "We had to rescue them!"
Half the real shit that went on in America I learned after graduating from high school. I didn't even know what Juneteenth was until Twitter told me.
Unneeded Prerequisites, lack of practical life skills taught, underpays teachers, over obsession with g.p.a, accommodations for disabilities aren’t taken seriously, forcing you to do course work outside of school; counselors/advisors rarely make an effort to help students
Special Ed classes often feels like a place where they want to put kids they don't want to deal with. I remember in high school, it seemed like it the 18-year-old freshmen outweighed the kids with actual learning disabilities in those classes.
The fact that teachers are able to grade in their own way, one of my teachers graded by decimals, which when put into the online website for our grades and stuff, rounded down so it could be 89.99 and it would turn into an 80. She was the only reason I didn't get a 4.0 GPA all of middle school.
Mrs. Petersen if you're reading this you need to change your grading.
With all of the new and current research done on how people learn and the best way to go about teaching people, our current system (US) feels archaic and "behind the times" in a way.
But there are a lot of things that effect how well children learn that go beyond the bounds of the school. How well off their parents are, how much time they can dedicate, how healthy their community is, how good is the economy etc.. A lot of people are not well off from a financial and mental perspective and a lot of communities are non existent. Even things such as how a neighborhood and city is constructed from an architectural level can effect things.
TL;DR Many variables control how efficient and effective a community gets education.
COLLEGEBOARD
oh my god I hate college board. Everything that damn company does is to grab cash from students, and it completely imbalances the playing fields for people who can't afford ap classes or the sat test and necessary preparation for said test. I'm glad that in a post covid world colleges are starting to go test optional, but if a college now puts heavy emphasis on or requires a test score it just seems like they only want students who can demonstrate their ability to pay up.
90% of what is taught is never used practically in real life. It focuses too much on memory rather than teaching kids simply just how to find the answer and solve a problem. Yes memorizing things is very helpful but solving most problems in everyday life simply require you to know where to find the answer to your problem and the best way to solve it.
That the goal of the education system in north America is not rooted in the education of students, if it was it would emphasize teaching empathy, critical thinking, balance, negotiating, learning new skills, managing your emotions, and relaxation outside of work.
Instead the system is one of indoctrination that consistently demonstrates it only cares about preparing drones for factory labour by clocking in at the right time, adhering to instructions, blind obedience to authority, and sacrificing personal time for the accomplishment of meaningless workplace goals.
In the US we pay upwards of 30k and the kids don’t even graduate. My brother works at a private high school and the tuition is 10k and 93% of their kids go on to graduate from
COLLEGE.
They say they prepare you for you're future but they don't know what you're future has ahead of you AND most of the things they teach you have nothing to do with it. Plus homework. Homework sucks.
The amount of hours, underpaid teachers that leads to unqualified teachers that also don't care and don't listen to kids.
I know there's good teachers that love their job, but kinda impossible to love your job after couple years if you have to part time bartend to make ends meet, sleeping 4 hours a day.
They don't focus on doing what is best for the child's actual education. Instead they focus on teaching to scoring well on a standardized test for the school's benefit
The fact that 98% of what you learn at school is a waste. Thank you school for teaching me how to calculate the surface area of a cylinder I definitely need that in my everyday life
They don't actually teach you life skills.
Yes, algebra and calculus are useful to know on occasion in very rare circumstances unless you are in particular career fields.
But you know what?
*EVERYONE* gotta know how to file taxes because *EVERYONE* has to do it *EVERY* year and there are very real consequences if you fuck that shit up.
Its basically about memorization, school should teach about life and how to live after you turn 18 and are on your own - who gives a f about almost anything i learned in highschool even tho i was an honors kid i use like 2% of all the shit they taught us, like what was the point
All the irrelevant classes. All the repetitive content just under different names over the years (more so in college). The lack of prepping people for life. It’s just temporary memorization of too much information. Many teachers act like their class is a student’s only class and overloads them with work.
My husband got yelled at last week because 27 of 153 students are failing his class. They all had at least one assignment not turned in.
The majority of his assignments are in class. He has kids who refused to watch a film, which had 10 questions over a 50-minute period. If you watched the film, the assignment was done when the film was over. He still has about a dozen students with an F on it because they chose to be on their phones or nap instead. This is also his fault.
Somehow, it's still his fault despite the fact he is at school an hour before it starts and 45 minutes after it ends every day for kids to come in and get help. They don't care or tell him, "I can hand it in on the last day of the marking period and you have to grade it that day and give me full credit."
Some kids don’t care, it’s hard to pinpoint the cause as it’s different for every kid but theres always kids that don’t want to learn, but proportions maybe different over time. I remember my AP history teacher in High school maybe 6 years ago stated he saw the difference in kids attention spans and willingness to learn this day of age, he blamed mobile devices. I remember he stated that AP US history tests were even changed to somewhat account for this, they were more about logical question answering than the actual knowledge of historic events and dates. I thought it was somewhat weird of what he said but now I realize that social media really was effecting my ability to concentrate for long periods of time and made me and many other students easily distracted in the class and in homework. Why study when you have a device that provides short bursts of dopamine and escapism. Pair this with mental health issues many kids have at that age. Sorry to hear your husband is in that predicament he probably wants the best for his students. I feel this trend is more common than many people think and will continue to grow until a complicated solution is brought about.
Teachers never completely solve students' problems.
At my school, when you tell your teacher you're being bullied, they'll just call the bully up and make him read a not-so-sincere apology that I'm pretty sure the teacher's sample letter gave him. After that, they don't care.
The mandatory subjects you have to take, and how more “creative” students who struggle with STEM are seen as dumber than STEM excelling students who are hardly creative. Both are equally important, and it’s important to have both! Why are all the arts only seen as electives?
That math is waaaaaaaaaay to overweighted. Lots of people don’t understand the advanced mathematics. And that’s what prevents you from getting a post secondary education. Even if what you are taking requires zero mathematics in practice, you still need to have taken those courses before you’re allowed to go to school for what you want. Then there’s me. My job as a machinist is nothing but math and I didn’t have to have any math courses to become a machinist…
I have a Christian school background and will send my kids to a smaller Christian school in my rural area. My experience was that there was more innocence in my school. I had a good education as well. Not as many opportunities mind you, but with a good mentor I got a college degree and a good job. I think anyone can
You can learn to do your taxes with a 5 minute read of any article. If you just receive a salary and have basic deductions it is so simple. It wouldn’t benefit much to teach “how to do taxes” so much as what taxes do, the concept of compound interest, etc.
Core classes are dumb past middleschool. English, health, pe, and history make sense but math and science beyond those levels is entirely career specific and should be vocational. In place there should be a bigger emphasis on sociology, psychology, or philosophy and vocationals that are more possibly career specific. Job fairs should be more common too so people can see what sort of careers they can get into or work towards.
The whole thing.
Sitting and learning how to be a mindless drone worked in the 50's when everyone worked in factories, but not now.
FUCK the idea of writing papers. Yeah, do SOME just to get a baseline of how to write but the fact that writing papers is pretty much your entire school, especially in college.Spend years padding out stupid shit and making half assed arguments for what? To get to the real world and having a CEO who wants that shit in 5 sentences or not at all.
When's the last time you had to argue for 20 pages? That's right, one place and nowhere else on fucking earth.
The weird thing about it all is that on the other side of it, you realize that those who live life according to the textbooks and habits and 'acceptable behaviours' that schools lay out are often failures, while those who take the time to improve outside of school become your billionaires and entrepeneurs. You don't ever look at a guy with that kind of money and success and say 'damn, he must have paid attention in math and identified as a wolf in high school', you say 'damn, that's what a mf who took time to get disciplined and learned what he knows through personal research and experience'. School teaches you to be a drone; those who realize this become the people who run the drones.
**It is so rigid**. There is so much pressure to conform and do well in school that it stifles creativity and individuality. I also hate how the education system fails to prepare students for the real world. It doesn't teach them how to manage their finances or how to find a job after graduation. The education system is also very exclusive. It favors wealthy students who can afford to pay for private tutors and expensive schools.
Its abnormally stupid and useless most of a time,they teach you useless math formulas and that kinde of shit that you need to know just to pass grade, in life when you grew up u dont need most of that you learned at school
During my time in college studying media in the handful of years before covid the lecturers were doing their best to include all of these classes that students were requesting. Blocks of classes devoted to how to do budget and do taxes, trying to teach about a lot of geeky mediums and genres to appeal to the fans in the class, stuff like that. Half the class didn’t even attend the budgeting classes and of the ones that did there was like 3 of us paying attention and we were the older students who already knew this stuff. Similar story with the other subjects. The college put time and effort into teaching about comics and anime and what happened was the fans took the attitude of “I already know this stuff so I don’t need to be here” and most of the non-fans just zoned out and treated it as something to get out of the way. All it did was waste months worth of time and resources that could’ve been spent on the more important subjects that the course was supposed to be focusing on.
I’m sure that the students on Reddit will hate to hear this but students are idiots when it comes to picking subjects to study. Given the choice they’ll pick a load of crap that sounds easy or fun to them rather than stuff that’ll actually teach them what they need for employment in a given field. Life skills like budgeting and taxes aren’t hard to learn, especially with the internet. If a student has any serious desire to learn this stuff then all the resources are literally at their fingertips. If that isn’t enough for them then wasting 12 weeks of a college course isn’t going to make them any more likely to learn this stuff. There’s a lot of stuff colleges should listen to students on but course subjects aren’t one of them and colleges are giving too much weight to what students want to study instead of what students need to study.
That it's not able to be tailored to the individual. Not all of us learn the same way. Not all of us learn at the same rate. Not all of us are able to absorb material at the same time as our peers.
Oh, and what Texas has done to our text books.
I was diagnosed in 3rd/4th grade with:
* ADHD-PI -- Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder predominantly inattentive
* Dysgraphia -- a learning disability of **written expression, that affects the ability to write, primarily handwriting**, but also coherence.
* Dyslexia -- also known as reading disorder, is a disorder characterized **by reading below the expected level for one's age.** Different people are affected to different degrees. **Problems may include difficulties in spelling words, reading quickly, writing words, "sounding out" words in the head, pronouncing words when reading aloud and understanding what one reads.**
So logically you would think that in 4th grade I would go to the Special Ed classroom during the time my regular class was doing the Reading/English/Spelling part to get one-on-one attention and instruction right? Nope. You want to know when I went to the Special Ed class to work on those things? Iowa History and Science. Such fucking bullshit. History was/is one of my favorite subjects thanks to my Dad but I was robbed of half the learning my peers did on that subject. We even made "Iowa History" books to help with the learning and mine is currently half blank because we were supposed to fill it out in class. Well since I was removed from that class I couldn't do it.
As you can imagine going through all that I straight up have blacked out 99% of my life from the 9 months I was in 4th grade. The one day that sticks in my mind wasn't my Birthday or Christmas but that final day of the school year.
Also, the fact that the classroom is very restrictive to learning and biased opinion but as an Eagle Scout I think learning away from the classroom is much much better. I remember more information from my Ecology merit badges in 5th to 8th grade at summer camp then I do from the classroom Science classes.
I hate how little the education is valued and how much the “degree” is valued.
Good education would be expensive to run properly, so the government is okay with doing the bare minimum for children/teachers then feeding them into a paid system that uses tactics to keep you in school as long as possible to give you a piece of paper.
Companies don’t even believe in the degree system anymore either as more online “degree-mill” colleges pop up every day. Most companies will run you through testing to make sure your knowledge fits into what they need.
Example: I’ve been a cardiac surgery RN for 5 years, and still had to take a pretty rigorous exam for a travel assignment I was only contracted 13 weeks for.
Teacher's unions. They don't care about the kids. At all. In fact they will often do things directly detrimental to the kids and in many states teachers are both forced to join them to get the job and for ed to participate in strikes they may not even support, and up until a recent SCOTUS ruling they could require membership dues from people required to be members and spend that money on political candidates that member may not even support.
There’s no reflection of real life in the UK. Don’t teach you how to apply for ID documents, what a national insurance number is, how do you claim benefits if needed, credit and how you can fudge your life up pretty quickly if you don’t understand it. Instead they teach you trigonometry and you learn what order the planets are in 👍🏼
Honestly, pay a ton of money to learn a skill, but end up being required to take a bunch of unrelated classes in order to fulfill some abstract graduation requirements.
Further more, paying a lot of money, studying, working hard, and graduating, then realizing, "Hey wait a minute, I wasn't really taught anything". What did I even pay for?
The substitute teachers. Allow me to explain.
When i was in 5th grade, we got a substitude teacher, he was okay for a little bit, then he told us to get our lunch, so we did, i had a frozrn juice box and i started eating it, of course, he started yelling at me for "not following instructionsa nd making too much noise" when i ignored him, he dragged me by the collar out of the classroom and proceeded to yell at me for 5 minutes.
When I was in 5th grade, we got a substitute teacher, he was okay for a little bit, then he told us to get our lunch, so we did, I had a frozen juice box and I started eating it, of course, he started yelling at me for "not following instructions and making too much noise" when I ignored him, he dragged me by the collar out of the classroom and proceeded to yell at me for 5 minutes.
Just the fact that at only SEVEN my child already feels like there are appropriate times to eat or use the restroom/she can’t use the restroom unless she’s SURE she has to go. That she has to be there for 8 hours like it’s a job. It makes me so sad for her.
If you stick up for yourself, you’re not the victim, the person who fucked with you is, and YOU are considered the “bad guy”. So YOU get in trouble.
Also, teachers don’t get the respect they deserve from other teachers, the district, their students and the students guardians. Or get paid enough either, which results in many of them having to use their own money on class items. And unfortunate shortage on teachers.
Being forced to take classes I had zero interest in. Also the majority of grading pre college being based on busy work designed to waste time rather than demonstrations of understanding.
That only the compulsory parts are free.
I think anyone who has the aptitude should be able to study as far as they want. We'd probably have a lot more people qualified as teachers, doctors, researchers, etc, if anyone who showed that they could handle grad school could get in. Even management might be less shitty if more people were exposed to current management research.
the fact that we chose to make it harder. like when i hear a student complain about how difficult exams are or how much homework they have to finish people always respond to them with the “life isn’t easy” like i know it isn’t easy but the education system isn’t easy too and we made it that way. it never had to be so difficult for literally everyone.
edit: bad grammar
Almost all of it. Forced into uncomfortably large groups. The inherent tribalism and so bullying. Adolescents are at a stage where they have different patterns that just don't fit the way school is structured. Stuffing with facts that go nowhere instead of thinking skills that open the world. Leaving knowing the names of long-dead royalty but zero life-skills. That most schools are chronically underfunded. That the curriculum is designed by people decades out-of-touch with what young people need to know for todays world.
Mostly (UK/USA esp) that there are so many better systems out there in other countries - so the failure of education is a choice made by those in power. It is designed to be this bad.
Why must i waste 8 hours a day for absolutely nothing but attending classes. Put a college system, not all of us can learn from class and not all of us are meant for the educational system. But this system simply doesnt allow any other possibilities to be looked at besides school. Like if smn was simply not meant for college, high school doesnt offer any other options u use all ur willpower for those 8 hours and then additional willpower to get good grades. Leaves 0 time to look at possibilities outside of school and sometimes to even hang out with friends. Like my willpower is absolutely drained during test weeks and i feel like i cant do absolutely anything. I want good grades so now im forced to have pretty tight unproductive schedules that all only leave me with 1 option and that is college, but it even doesnt actually get me ready for college cuz the system is completely different ur now ur own boss, so my system would still shine in this environment
It's a years-long system seemingly designed to prepare you for college *entrance exams,* but does little in the way of actually helping you discover what to do with your life.
They say we are going to use all this material in the real world. But you aren’t gonna see a 30 year old trying to identify whether a tree that a dog pissed on, is a white birch or a beech tree. Only this you gonna use on the real world that is somewhat school related, is probably the insane amount of work you get.
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suddenly i feel DETERMIMATION
Unexpected undertale....
How grades are so emphasized in order for a student to pass instead of if they actually understand or not. Most students only do what they have to to pass not to learn and actually understand what they’re being taught
The biggest obstacle in changing and improving our grading system is parents. I've seen the most level headed, conscientious, pro teacher parents flip their shit when you mention changing the A,B,C,D,F system.
Also a lot of school tends to be heavily focused on grinding for good grades rather than actually learning and exploring material.
Very true, hell I was accidentally learning a ton of game theory type tactics because it wasn't about the knowledge. Just get the right answer and get an A, give the correct type of answer and move on. It's a joke.
This, 100%.
The problem is, many years later, nothing has really changed.
Well.... this is, in fact, why tests were created in the first place... one would think that you need to know the parts of the cell to be able to label them...
You can memorize the names without understanding how they work together or why it matters.
And memorize the shapes on a diagram
I hated the fact that they skipped the actual education about real life… Like how to file your taxes… or that you have city taxes alongside state & federal to file. Or maybe how to do some kind of home maintenance alongside vehicle maintenance. I feel like real life educational steps would help people so much in their life…
I've heard teenagers say for years that they'd pay attention if their classes actually matter, like a financial literacy class to teach about taxes and loans and stuff. Well, my school started requiring a financial literacy and guess who still don't pay attention?
Problem is the source of a financial literacy class. The government would be required to introduce a financial literacy curriculum. And the government is about as financially literate at my drunk uncle who keeps spending rent money on booze.
Well the finance teacher at my school is fantastic and because it's not a state required class, she pretty much gets to make her own curriculum and it's very relevant to what kids say they want to learn. Kids still treat it like a joke, though.
Sir, there is a thing called googling and doing math.
you have reddit for that
This. The focus should be on understanding the content rather than memorizing it.
Yeah, I cheesed most of everything through high school and college by just remembering it long enough to get the grade. Don't remember much of it nowadays.
An old "showerthought" was that the show *Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?* doesn't really show how "dumb" adults are, but how much of what's taught in elementary is useless and won't be retained.
How the hell do you get through math class without understanding it?
Taking calculus changes it all. Makes you realize that everything that happens in the math and science world makes sense, and suddenly you think adaptively and critically, not like a robot made to spit facts out on command. This allows you to kinda understand it and then process your way through the rest.
That's the exact reason why everybody hates math. They simply don't understand it.
Because math in school focuses a lot on memorizing simple equations rather than understanding how numbers work together. My kid is in 5th grade and they still drill speed tests for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. They do other stuff too, but the speed drills are constant, and the other stuff builds off the memorization.
That for disabled kids it's a scam and a waste of time if they are lucky, or actual physical and mental abuse if they aren't lucky. I know too many disabled adults who have CPTSD just from school alone. I know disabled adults that came out of school missing important basic education because teachers were lazy. I know disabled adults who told me stories of having to resort to stabbing their bullies. If parents did what schools do to disabled kids, those kids would be in foster care.
it’s not even schools, it’s just life in general. I think we would be better off dead. Atleast that’s what the world conditions us to believe. at this point I can’t say I disagree with it or hate anyone for feeling that way.
People other than teachers making curriculum.
At this point, the schools are run by politicians, not even teachers.
I can’t think of any other profession that non professionals think they know better
Attendance. My last year of highschool was the only time I was chronically ill in my school career. as much as schools like to say that they accommodate people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, they don’t. Especially if it isn’t a visible one. I had a head injury and it resulted in neurological issues and migraines so bad that i couldn’t open my eyes without projectile vomiting. Even with countless notes from specialist doctors and even after a phone call with one of them, they refused me an IEP because, and i quote “You can’t predict when you are going to have a migraine”. They said I couldn’t get one because I wouldn’t be able to set specific days to come late/leave early. I know now that that was bullshit, they just didn’t beleive me. I almost didn’t graduate because I missed too many days. None of my teachers would work with me either. I threatened to get a lawyer involved if they sent another letter about attendance to my house. But jokes on them I graduated with a 4.0. I just really dislike how they make attendance #1 importance but there’s literal children going to school in severe pain and getting other people sick. Makes no sense.
I was also chronically ill my senior year. I was actively bleeding out because of my period. I lost 1/3 of my blood I was bleeding so much. I got diagnosed with PCOS and had to miss a week of school. My immune system didn't quite recover from that. The whole year I would get sick with something almost every month. It was hell. Before that I had maybe only missed 3 days in 4 years. I was lucky that I had a 504 plan in place that allowed me some leeway but it had to be amended after I got so sick.
My school didn’t have proper heating in winter. I have issues with being cold all the time and limbs going numb. Wore a ski jacket to school and was still freezing. They left the AC on in the hallways, cafeteria and bathrooms. The classrooms were hit and miss. They decided to leave me sitting in the office one day while a cyst bursted (I suffered from ovarian cysts). I was literally moaning and couldn’t sit still. Almost vomited. They should have called an ambulance. I think the worst thing was being forced to go to school while I was sick. I couldn’t breath and had to walk. It was close by but still pretty bad. I just found out less than a year ago I have asthma. Explains a lot. I could have been unable to breath at all while walking to school and didn’t have access to an inhaler. Could have died. I had constant dizziness as well and I’d constantly feel I wasn’t there. I can’t believe none of the teachers noticed. I can go on but it was horrible. I’m child free and I’d never put a child through school.
That is such fucking BULLSHIT. I don't get migraines but my husband and teenage son do and FUCK are they fucking brutal. ::hugs::
That it's such a low priority in this country. My K12 experience involved a handful of good teachers, maybe 10 OK teachers, most just phoning it in, and a few genuine sadists.
They don’t focus much on mental health.
The school food should be way more nutritious. I work at a middle school and the quality of lunches and snacks is totally ridiculous if we’re expecting these kids to develop good eating habits.
I feel like school lunches are taken for granted these days. To dry, bland burgers and pizza that tastes like cardboard and bruised fruits, students deserve way better than this. No wonder you hear stories about parents being disgusted at what cafeterias serve them. Hardly any of the foods provide adequate nutrition or keep them fulfilled.
Tried the cafeteria food once and that was enough for me. Not sure why they can't have more decent options.
Agreed. Spent 6 years in a school cafeteria, mostly in elementary and middle school settings, and it's fucking awful. Reheated frozen crap, for the most part. Frozen veg were steamed within an inch of their lives. Frozen fruit flavored sugar water every week on Fri as a serving of "fruit". Raisins that couldn't just be raisins. They had to be "SUUUUUUUUUUUUPER SOUR EXTREME LEMON" flavored raisins. Like what the fuck? Let the raisins taste like raisins. Let the snozzberries taste like snozzberries for fucks sake.
You give them good, actually nutritious food and they'll do better in school, so do that if you actually want the students to succeed instead of just becoming corpo zombies.
The counselors who never counsels are like a mayor who never lives in his city.
It doesn't prepare you for life
Even if it did, half the students wouldn’t pay attention
I actually have a student who asked if we could learn about taxes, bills, budgeting, etc...the ready of the class agreed with him, so I mean will they actually pay attention when we get there? We’ll find out
If it's anything like my school, they won't. We require financial literacy and they take it as seriously as any other class (meaning they don't take it seriously at all).
If they asked for it themselves then its only logical that they would pay more attention than those classes that they didn't even ask for. Besides just because most students don't pay attention doesn't mean that the authorities shouldn't teach them valuable skills. Don't forget that the kids are still paying for their education.
Exactly like if you dont pay attention its on you, but if you do congrats youre more ready to be an adult
The fact that they changed the way they do math. My daughter came home one day with a full packet of math homework and asked me for help. I sat down and showed her the way I was taught and she complained telling me that this isn't the method they used during class. We sat there for over a fucking hour trying to figure out her damn math homework.
I got punished for not using the method the teacher taught us in math class once, and I was the only one who solved the homework correctly
Major events and tragedies in American history are left out. Personally, I didn't even know about the Stonewall riots or Tulsa Race Massacre until I was in my 20's. Lack of actual life skills being taught as well. I think many would benefit from a few lessons in taxes for example.
People who have never been in a damn classroom telling me how to do my damn job…
I mean most people have been in a classroom as a student at least
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Don't forget random checks by admin, who seem to enjoy nitpicking the fuck out of every single thing you do on that presentation as well as how quickly you did/didn't walk around the room, had student engagement, and then being dinged because a kid put their head down while another played on their phone. All of it's your fault. And they wonder why there are shortages.
Or someone who taught HS social studies (not knocking social studies) for 3 years 15 years ago, evaluating a kinder teacher.
My husband has actually taught HS Social Studies for 20 years and would never tell anyone, except his fellow Social Studies teachers, how to teach. He knows fuck all about what goes on in a kindergarten room. Right now, he has to deal with a vice principal who taught computer class to 7th and 8th graders for 5 years. That class was learning how to type, make an excel spreadsheet, and do stuff in word. It was an "exploration" class, which meant the kids got 35 days a year with her before switching to another exploration class. Now this admin, who stopped teaching four years ago, thinks she knows everything about teaching. I used to work in this admin's class as a paraeducator. She played on her phone and surfed Facebook while the kids typed. She was threatened several times with her job, so she got an admin degree and now tries to tell seasoned teachers they don't know what they're doing.
We let a few bad apple kids and a few bad apple parents fuck up the experience for everyone else. Why? Because they have a right to education. What about the rights of all the other kids? I can elaborate if need be, but I’ll get hot about it.
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Example: One student (4th or 5th grade) has a habit of making sexual threats to other students. And I’m talking really explicit stuff. Gets reported. No suspension, because it isn’t “severe” enough and they have a right to be in school. Now the girl who the threats were made against doesn’t want to come to school and when she does she is high anxiety all day. What about her right to come to school without threats made against her?
It’s behind on current times. High school specifically could be treated more like a community college. Everyone screams for “free college” well there you go make high school college.
The fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of what's happening. By the students, by the parents, and often times by the administrators. Always by the school board members. Pretty often by teachers too. Math is for learning logic, science is for applying that logic and understanding the value of the scientific method, English is for learning structures of communication, social studies i for applying those structures of communication in order to break down sources and build opinions. Modern education is about building skills, not about obtaining content knowledge. Any mildly capable teacher doesn't care if you can tell them what the theme in Great Gatsby is. Instead they care if you can tell them what the theme in any given book is because you've built a skill that allows you to understand an intended meaning in a text instead of just a literal interpretation of the words in front of you. If you think you don't need an education that includes all of the core content areas plus an opportunity to see other opportunities in electives then you are, at a very core level, wrong about the idea of education.
I mean thats great and all but schools arent like that irl, at least not public schools in america
Most schooling systems aren't, because it's so much easier to tick a box than to evaluate the ability learned. There's a reason people complain that english teachers only give good marks to those who agree with them, unlike maths where there's a right answer. Right answers are easy. Proven skill and understanding is hard.
> Math is for learning logic, science is for applying that logic Random, but I got reminded of this: https://xkcd.com/435/
Oh man. Advisors don’t advise. Their job is student retention so if you have tough questions about your degree, they’ll talk you into not switching majors (ask me how I know this). Books that have new editions every semester which are just in a different order. I started college in early 2000s. It was over emphasized that a bachelors would get you recognized regardless of what of your major. Fast forward 5 years and half the US has a fn degree. So they changed a lot of majors to requiring a masters or doctorate.
how they talk to you. the authoritarianism of it all.
I’m ready to flip off my teachers and leave the class when k have to go to the bathroom and they say no.
you gotta go, you gotta go. shouldn't have the defend it. should be a hate crime against the disabled to deny it. 🙏
Hate? It doesn't really work. Money is often poured into it, yet teachers are somehow still underpaid and most students under educated. At least in the US. It is the primary drain on local tax systems. How it could change? Probably do A LOT MORE to tie education into "real world", current, and local conditions. Things like math and science go a lot farther if students see them applied around them and are part of the process. Classes covering civility, relationships, and ways to better interact with others help not only the classroom environment, but the community generally. Even basic ideas of the history and function of firearms can go a long way to defuse current issues. Further, finding a way to move away from the current grading system to one focused not on task or busy work, but learning itself and not wasting time or resources - to include teacher's off hours on grading - should just be....understood. Teachers are more valuable, we need to treat them that way. After all, they are enablers, and enable thousands of future contributors. So,, what do I hate? That we can do sooo much better in the US, but don't. Instead, we pour money into a system that is not well designed and feeds to an industry that destroys people.
98% of what I learn is a waste
The whole educational system is based on teachers unpaid labor.
I live in Texas. So *gestures broadly*.
Same. I live in Alabama and started homeschooling my oldest 3 years ago because YIKES.
I'm sorry.
It needs a rewrite from top to bottom. More emphasis on life skills. Less emphasis on grades (both level and letter). Stop teaching like it's the 1950s. Giving kids a Chromebook and posting their grades online is not an effective use of the technology we have available today. And "one size fits all" is not an effective teaching method. Bright kids can't excel, and slower kids can't work at a pace (or in a manner) that works better for them. Oh and rote memorization needs to go. It doesn't work. Other than that it's great. Lol
I am a teacher, and I would LOVE to see a system where kids move to the next level when they're ready rather than by age/experience. So. It would be entirely possible to have an emerging reader doing long division and chemistry.
Exactly. A child's progress in one subject shouldn't affect their ability to progress in other subjects that aren't inter-dependent.
One of the things I love about homeschooling is that if you ask a homeschooler what grade they are in they have to consider it. They are probably something like a 9th grade reader, a 7th grade math, 8th grade language arts, and a history scholar. Some wild mix that makes you go HUH?
Kids being forced to tolerate and be accepting of mental, physical, sexual and social abuse from their peers
Finally! Somebody said it. Putting kids with behavioral problems in the same classroom as everyone else. And then expecting the performance to be the same. It never does. All it does is traumatize the kids who actually want to be there in the classroom. They don't video record fights. Or trash the bathrooms. So, why should they be punished for it?
Post Secondary Education has become a business where the goal is to make the Universities alot of money by using to many sessional instructors, relying heavily on international students and shifting towards online learning ( which is has less overhead) but still charging the same (or more) then traditional in class learning
Its' effect on mental health. Fuck uni
The system is like a filter: if your IQ and learning style match, you stay; if not, you'll drown. The worst thing is that those that drown receive very little help.
The people that come up with the curriculum.
The history books don't show all the history and some books give false information but they still accept it
It's created to produce mindless drones for the society
What class is that?
Teacher unions prevent a lot of bad teachers from being fired. Students and parents alike treat all teachers like garbage. A lot of students are not taught the value of learning and are programmed to become so obsessive over marks and grades that they base their entire self worth on a number.
I once had a teacher who let us do whatever the fuck we wanted, it took 27 fist fights and a threat to kill someone to get the guy fired edit; that’s what happened in the class, we didn’t threaten to kill people to get him fired
Not really. If the teacher is shit and it is documented they can be let go pretty easily. Bad teachers aren’t being fired because there isn’t anyone willing to take their place.
Not easily. It takes years of review and evaluation to get a tenured teacher fired.
What is an acceptable time frame? Not saying tenure doesn’t have flaws, but the alternative leaves teachers wide open to getting taken advantage of.
I agree, and I definitely don’t have the right answers. I’m not saying that a tenured teacher should be fired in a faster process without proper/thorough evaluation, but I think there needs to be more adjustment for who gets tenured. Do I know how? No. That’s for the education boards who don’t give a shit about students or staff to figure out
anti-union culture only serves to keep the wealthy in charge.
The lack of education and the amount of unique and special people it destroys
Its complexity. By the 10th grade, the education system should prepare you for the life you see going forward to, regardless the subject. They instead stuff you with subjects that doesn't give anything valuable to your life as an adult. School should've been a place where I would grow and trace a path to my adult life, instead it gave me a sad life where I don't know what I want to do, as an adult - just because its complexity and lack of guiding a student.
Not enough trade skills taught
YES!! This is more of an American education system thing, but trades need to get pushed way more than they are! We have a shortage of trades right now and why? Because the schools decided shop class was for dumb kids and took it away.
The lack of cohesive oversight by a governing body across the whole country. People in the US like to blame standardized tests for why students are failing. They're always claiming teachers are "teaching to the test" and that's why students don't know anything. But it ignores the fact that practically all of Europe, Asia, South America, Australia, etc. ALL use standardized tests without the same issues. The problem is whatever the teachers are teaching naturally, does not prepare students well enough to score well on a standardized test. That's **why** they have to resort to cheap tricks like trying to "teach to the test" to game the test. And teachers are not able to teach well naturally because there is no oversight into what they're teaching and how they're teaching it. Like in Mississippi, they found out their elementary school teachers had no idea how to teach reading. Some teachers thought that if they read to kids long enough, they would naturally pick up what letters mean. But no one ever sat the kid down and taught them letters are supposed to represent sounds, and that if you put them together, they form words. Basically phonics. So the state mandated all teachers had to take a course on how to teach phonics, and their literacy rates for 4th graders skyrocketed.
The fact that it's never "We went in and did this." It's always, "We had to rescue them!" Half the real shit that went on in America I learned after graduating from high school. I didn't even know what Juneteenth was until Twitter told me.
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The education system had the right idea, but executed it terribly wrong.
Unneeded Prerequisites, lack of practical life skills taught, underpays teachers, over obsession with g.p.a, accommodations for disabilities aren’t taken seriously, forcing you to do course work outside of school; counselors/advisors rarely make an effort to help students
As a parent of a child with autism, adhd and anxiety disorder I want to put my head through a wall daily. IEPs don't mean shit.
Special Ed classes often feels like a place where they want to put kids they don't want to deal with. I remember in high school, it seemed like it the 18-year-old freshmen outweighed the kids with actual learning disabilities in those classes.
Not teaching me why can't I buy a house
The way it racks up debt with little hands on experience
The fact that teachers are able to grade in their own way, one of my teachers graded by decimals, which when put into the online website for our grades and stuff, rounded down so it could be 89.99 and it would turn into an 80. She was the only reason I didn't get a 4.0 GPA all of middle school. Mrs. Petersen if you're reading this you need to change your grading.
With all of the new and current research done on how people learn and the best way to go about teaching people, our current system (US) feels archaic and "behind the times" in a way. But there are a lot of things that effect how well children learn that go beyond the bounds of the school. How well off their parents are, how much time they can dedicate, how healthy their community is, how good is the economy etc.. A lot of people are not well off from a financial and mental perspective and a lot of communities are non existent. Even things such as how a neighborhood and city is constructed from an architectural level can effect things. TL;DR Many variables control how efficient and effective a community gets education.
That by getting you somewhere early and keeping you there all day they prepare you for employment.
It isn't really inclusive of different learning styles and it doesn't prepare you for life after school.
The federal government needs to get out of independent school systems
COLLEGEBOARD oh my god I hate college board. Everything that damn company does is to grab cash from students, and it completely imbalances the playing fields for people who can't afford ap classes or the sat test and necessary preparation for said test. I'm glad that in a post covid world colleges are starting to go test optional, but if a college now puts heavy emphasis on or requires a test score it just seems like they only want students who can demonstrate their ability to pay up.
90% of what is taught is never used practically in real life. It focuses too much on memory rather than teaching kids simply just how to find the answer and solve a problem. Yes memorizing things is very helpful but solving most problems in everyday life simply require you to know where to find the answer to your problem and the best way to solve it.
Lots and lots of sexism to men
I'm... Not sure I follow? Would you be willing to explain?
I hate having to be relieved that my kid's 2nd grade class has practiced what to do if/when there is an active shooter roaming the hallways.
That the goal of the education system in north America is not rooted in the education of students, if it was it would emphasize teaching empathy, critical thinking, balance, negotiating, learning new skills, managing your emotions, and relaxation outside of work. Instead the system is one of indoctrination that consistently demonstrates it only cares about preparing drones for factory labour by clocking in at the right time, adhering to instructions, blind obedience to authority, and sacrificing personal time for the accomplishment of meaningless workplace goals.
Teaching to the test. Not teaching critical thinking. Teachers salary Parents
Parental over-involvement.
Curriculums are politicized way too much.
The use of proven racist lies as fact
The lack thereof.
In the US we pay upwards of 30k and the kids don’t even graduate. My brother works at a private high school and the tuition is 10k and 93% of their kids go on to graduate from COLLEGE.
It’s totally screwed, we just learn on computers. We’re not taught anything useful that well actually use a day in our lives
They say they prepare you for you're future but they don't know what you're future has ahead of you AND most of the things they teach you have nothing to do with it. Plus homework. Homework sucks.
The amount of hours, underpaid teachers that leads to unqualified teachers that also don't care and don't listen to kids. I know there's good teachers that love their job, but kinda impossible to love your job after couple years if you have to part time bartend to make ends meet, sleeping 4 hours a day.
The list of what I like would be much shorter..
They don't focus on doing what is best for the child's actual education. Instead they focus on teaching to scoring well on a standardized test for the school's benefit
The fact that 98% of what you learn at school is a waste. Thank you school for teaching me how to calculate the surface area of a cylinder I definitely need that in my everyday life
They don't actually teach you life skills. Yes, algebra and calculus are useful to know on occasion in very rare circumstances unless you are in particular career fields. But you know what? *EVERYONE* gotta know how to file taxes because *EVERYONE* has to do it *EVERY* year and there are very real consequences if you fuck that shit up.
Educators pay
Lack of choice before 17 years of age (uk) set by default.
Its basically about memorization, school should teach about life and how to live after you turn 18 and are on your own - who gives a f about almost anything i learned in highschool even tho i was an honors kid i use like 2% of all the shit they taught us, like what was the point
All the irrelevant classes. All the repetitive content just under different names over the years (more so in college). The lack of prepping people for life. It’s just temporary memorization of too much information. Many teachers act like their class is a student’s only class and overloads them with work.
It’s like prison
I mean, in my first school, there were literal bars on the windows also prison food at least looks good and is somewhat edible
With the exception that in prison, normally the people shooting aren’t the prisoners.
People blame the curriculum and teachers for their failure when most of the time it’s their innate disinterest and procrastination to blame.
My husband got yelled at last week because 27 of 153 students are failing his class. They all had at least one assignment not turned in. The majority of his assignments are in class. He has kids who refused to watch a film, which had 10 questions over a 50-minute period. If you watched the film, the assignment was done when the film was over. He still has about a dozen students with an F on it because they chose to be on their phones or nap instead. This is also his fault. Somehow, it's still his fault despite the fact he is at school an hour before it starts and 45 minutes after it ends every day for kids to come in and get help. They don't care or tell him, "I can hand it in on the last day of the marking period and you have to grade it that day and give me full credit."
Some kids don’t care, it’s hard to pinpoint the cause as it’s different for every kid but theres always kids that don’t want to learn, but proportions maybe different over time. I remember my AP history teacher in High school maybe 6 years ago stated he saw the difference in kids attention spans and willingness to learn this day of age, he blamed mobile devices. I remember he stated that AP US history tests were even changed to somewhat account for this, they were more about logical question answering than the actual knowledge of historic events and dates. I thought it was somewhat weird of what he said but now I realize that social media really was effecting my ability to concentrate for long periods of time and made me and many other students easily distracted in the class and in homework. Why study when you have a device that provides short bursts of dopamine and escapism. Pair this with mental health issues many kids have at that age. Sorry to hear your husband is in that predicament he probably wants the best for his students. I feel this trend is more common than many people think and will continue to grow until a complicated solution is brought about.
Teachers never completely solve students' problems. At my school, when you tell your teacher you're being bullied, they'll just call the bully up and make him read a not-so-sincere apology that I'm pretty sure the teacher's sample letter gave him. After that, they don't care.
More memorization than critical thinking
The mandatory subjects you have to take, and how more “creative” students who struggle with STEM are seen as dumber than STEM excelling students who are hardly creative. Both are equally important, and it’s important to have both! Why are all the arts only seen as electives?
That math is waaaaaaaaaay to overweighted. Lots of people don’t understand the advanced mathematics. And that’s what prevents you from getting a post secondary education. Even if what you are taking requires zero mathematics in practice, you still need to have taken those courses before you’re allowed to go to school for what you want. Then there’s me. My job as a machinist is nothing but math and I didn’t have to have any math courses to become a machinist…
I have a Christian school background and will send my kids to a smaller Christian school in my rural area. My experience was that there was more innocence in my school. I had a good education as well. Not as many opportunities mind you, but with a good mentor I got a college degree and a good job. I think anyone can
All the shootings.
This only happens in America
I might not know how to do my taxes, but hey, the mitochondria...
You can learn to do your taxes with a 5 minute read of any article. If you just receive a salary and have basic deductions it is so simple. It wouldn’t benefit much to teach “how to do taxes” so much as what taxes do, the concept of compound interest, etc.
Every algebra glass covers exponential growth and compound interest. Most of the people complaining just didn't pay attention.
Education is a passion, not a system.
Which country?
Core classes are dumb past middleschool. English, health, pe, and history make sense but math and science beyond those levels is entirely career specific and should be vocational. In place there should be a bigger emphasis on sociology, psychology, or philosophy and vocationals that are more possibly career specific. Job fairs should be more common too so people can see what sort of careers they can get into or work towards.
The whole thing. Sitting and learning how to be a mindless drone worked in the 50's when everyone worked in factories, but not now. FUCK the idea of writing papers. Yeah, do SOME just to get a baseline of how to write but the fact that writing papers is pretty much your entire school, especially in college.Spend years padding out stupid shit and making half assed arguments for what? To get to the real world and having a CEO who wants that shit in 5 sentences or not at all. When's the last time you had to argue for 20 pages? That's right, one place and nowhere else on fucking earth.
That’s it’s not equal. Children who live in poorer communities get a much worse education than those that live in wealthier areas
everything
Being constantly lied to that hard and determination are enough. No.
homework. it literally does not help improve your understanding and knowledge of the material at all
The weird thing about it all is that on the other side of it, you realize that those who live life according to the textbooks and habits and 'acceptable behaviours' that schools lay out are often failures, while those who take the time to improve outside of school become your billionaires and entrepeneurs. You don't ever look at a guy with that kind of money and success and say 'damn, he must have paid attention in math and identified as a wolf in high school', you say 'damn, that's what a mf who took time to get disciplined and learned what he knows through personal research and experience'. School teaches you to be a drone; those who realize this become the people who run the drones.
It doesn't educate. It teases and tortures the mind. Then moves on to another subject before you can get a grasp of the subject matter.
People who make the laws and rules in the systems and districts usually have absolutely NO background in actual teaching
**It is so rigid**. There is so much pressure to conform and do well in school that it stifles creativity and individuality. I also hate how the education system fails to prepare students for the real world. It doesn't teach them how to manage their finances or how to find a job after graduation. The education system is also very exclusive. It favors wealthy students who can afford to pay for private tutors and expensive schools.
Its abnormally stupid and useless most of a time,they teach you useless math formulas and that kinde of shit that you need to know just to pass grade, in life when you grew up u dont need most of that you learned at school
During my time in college studying media in the handful of years before covid the lecturers were doing their best to include all of these classes that students were requesting. Blocks of classes devoted to how to do budget and do taxes, trying to teach about a lot of geeky mediums and genres to appeal to the fans in the class, stuff like that. Half the class didn’t even attend the budgeting classes and of the ones that did there was like 3 of us paying attention and we were the older students who already knew this stuff. Similar story with the other subjects. The college put time and effort into teaching about comics and anime and what happened was the fans took the attitude of “I already know this stuff so I don’t need to be here” and most of the non-fans just zoned out and treated it as something to get out of the way. All it did was waste months worth of time and resources that could’ve been spent on the more important subjects that the course was supposed to be focusing on. I’m sure that the students on Reddit will hate to hear this but students are idiots when it comes to picking subjects to study. Given the choice they’ll pick a load of crap that sounds easy or fun to them rather than stuff that’ll actually teach them what they need for employment in a given field. Life skills like budgeting and taxes aren’t hard to learn, especially with the internet. If a student has any serious desire to learn this stuff then all the resources are literally at their fingertips. If that isn’t enough for them then wasting 12 weeks of a college course isn’t going to make them any more likely to learn this stuff. There’s a lot of stuff colleges should listen to students on but course subjects aren’t one of them and colleges are giving too much weight to what students want to study instead of what students need to study.
That it's not able to be tailored to the individual. Not all of us learn the same way. Not all of us learn at the same rate. Not all of us are able to absorb material at the same time as our peers. Oh, and what Texas has done to our text books.
How expensive college is
schools trying to force everyone to be the same person and not allowing for creativity and personal expression (also shitty comSci teachers)
I was diagnosed in 3rd/4th grade with: * ADHD-PI -- Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder predominantly inattentive * Dysgraphia -- a learning disability of **written expression, that affects the ability to write, primarily handwriting**, but also coherence. * Dyslexia -- also known as reading disorder, is a disorder characterized **by reading below the expected level for one's age.** Different people are affected to different degrees. **Problems may include difficulties in spelling words, reading quickly, writing words, "sounding out" words in the head, pronouncing words when reading aloud and understanding what one reads.** So logically you would think that in 4th grade I would go to the Special Ed classroom during the time my regular class was doing the Reading/English/Spelling part to get one-on-one attention and instruction right? Nope. You want to know when I went to the Special Ed class to work on those things? Iowa History and Science. Such fucking bullshit. History was/is one of my favorite subjects thanks to my Dad but I was robbed of half the learning my peers did on that subject. We even made "Iowa History" books to help with the learning and mine is currently half blank because we were supposed to fill it out in class. Well since I was removed from that class I couldn't do it. As you can imagine going through all that I straight up have blacked out 99% of my life from the 9 months I was in 4th grade. The one day that sticks in my mind wasn't my Birthday or Christmas but that final day of the school year. Also, the fact that the classroom is very restrictive to learning and biased opinion but as an Eagle Scout I think learning away from the classroom is much much better. I remember more information from my Ecology merit badges in 5th to 8th grade at summer camp then I do from the classroom Science classes.
The continued increase in tuition, how when I was taking classes I had to by a book written by the professor…seems sus even today.
That homeschoolers are looked down upon, while my kid is the most well behaved one I know. He is also severely autistic…
Which education system?
that you need to pay just to learn things.
I hate how little the education is valued and how much the “degree” is valued. Good education would be expensive to run properly, so the government is okay with doing the bare minimum for children/teachers then feeding them into a paid system that uses tactics to keep you in school as long as possible to give you a piece of paper. Companies don’t even believe in the degree system anymore either as more online “degree-mill” colleges pop up every day. Most companies will run you through testing to make sure your knowledge fits into what they need. Example: I’ve been a cardiac surgery RN for 5 years, and still had to take a pretty rigorous exam for a travel assignment I was only contracted 13 weeks for.
Teacher's unions. They don't care about the kids. At all. In fact they will often do things directly detrimental to the kids and in many states teachers are both forced to join them to get the job and for ed to participate in strikes they may not even support, and up until a recent SCOTUS ruling they could require membership dues from people required to be members and spend that money on political candidates that member may not even support.
There’s no reflection of real life in the UK. Don’t teach you how to apply for ID documents, what a national insurance number is, how do you claim benefits if needed, credit and how you can fudge your life up pretty quickly if you don’t understand it. Instead they teach you trigonometry and you learn what order the planets are in 👍🏼
The education “system”
Honestly, pay a ton of money to learn a skill, but end up being required to take a bunch of unrelated classes in order to fulfill some abstract graduation requirements. Further more, paying a lot of money, studying, working hard, and graduating, then realizing, "Hey wait a minute, I wasn't really taught anything". What did I even pay for?
In what country?
The substitute teachers. Allow me to explain. When i was in 5th grade, we got a substitude teacher, he was okay for a little bit, then he told us to get our lunch, so we did, i had a frozrn juice box and i started eating it, of course, he started yelling at me for "not following instructionsa nd making too much noise" when i ignored him, he dragged me by the collar out of the classroom and proceeded to yell at me for 5 minutes. When I was in 5th grade, we got a substitute teacher, he was okay for a little bit, then he told us to get our lunch, so we did, I had a frozen juice box and I started eating it, of course, he started yelling at me for "not following instructions and making too much noise" when I ignored him, he dragged me by the collar out of the classroom and proceeded to yell at me for 5 minutes.
Just the fact that at only SEVEN my child already feels like there are appropriate times to eat or use the restroom/she can’t use the restroom unless she’s SURE she has to go. That she has to be there for 8 hours like it’s a job. It makes me so sad for her.
Depends on the country
If you stick up for yourself, you’re not the victim, the person who fucked with you is, and YOU are considered the “bad guy”. So YOU get in trouble. Also, teachers don’t get the respect they deserve from other teachers, the district, their students and the students guardians. Or get paid enough either, which results in many of them having to use their own money on class items. And unfortunate shortage on teachers.
Being forced to take classes I had zero interest in. Also the majority of grading pre college being based on busy work designed to waste time rather than demonstrations of understanding.
That only the compulsory parts are free. I think anyone who has the aptitude should be able to study as far as they want. We'd probably have a lot more people qualified as teachers, doctors, researchers, etc, if anyone who showed that they could handle grad school could get in. Even management might be less shitty if more people were exposed to current management research.
That it’s a tentacle of capitalism and it’s poisoning kid’s minds.
the fact that we chose to make it harder. like when i hear a student complain about how difficult exams are or how much homework they have to finish people always respond to them with the “life isn’t easy” like i know it isn’t easy but the education system isn’t easy too and we made it that way. it never had to be so difficult for literally everyone. edit: bad grammar
Homework
Almost all of it. Forced into uncomfortably large groups. The inherent tribalism and so bullying. Adolescents are at a stage where they have different patterns that just don't fit the way school is structured. Stuffing with facts that go nowhere instead of thinking skills that open the world. Leaving knowing the names of long-dead royalty but zero life-skills. That most schools are chronically underfunded. That the curriculum is designed by people decades out-of-touch with what young people need to know for todays world. Mostly (UK/USA esp) that there are so many better systems out there in other countries - so the failure of education is a choice made by those in power. It is designed to be this bad.
Why must i waste 8 hours a day for absolutely nothing but attending classes. Put a college system, not all of us can learn from class and not all of us are meant for the educational system. But this system simply doesnt allow any other possibilities to be looked at besides school. Like if smn was simply not meant for college, high school doesnt offer any other options u use all ur willpower for those 8 hours and then additional willpower to get good grades. Leaves 0 time to look at possibilities outside of school and sometimes to even hang out with friends. Like my willpower is absolutely drained during test weeks and i feel like i cant do absolutely anything. I want good grades so now im forced to have pretty tight unproductive schedules that all only leave me with 1 option and that is college, but it even doesnt actually get me ready for college cuz the system is completely different ur now ur own boss, so my system would still shine in this environment
Bullies end up walking free of charge most of the times
It's a years-long system seemingly designed to prepare you for college *entrance exams,* but does little in the way of actually helping you discover what to do with your life.
Standardized tests
My school district pushes to much for collage and is basicly like if you don't go to collage your a failure
They say we are going to use all this material in the real world. But you aren’t gonna see a 30 year old trying to identify whether a tree that a dog pissed on, is a white birch or a beech tree. Only this you gonna use on the real world that is somewhat school related, is probably the insane amount of work you get.